Top 50 Albums of 2004

Riding in on a wave of hi-gloss dance music, glitch-heavy electro/acoustic hybrids, and disco-fueled punk noir, 2004 peered back past the Moroder era for inspiration, which it discovered in the foundations of primitive American folk music, vintage soul, dancehall reggae, and, of course, Smile. But the oddities were as intriguing as the trends: a powerfully emotive (and classically indie) conceptual rock epic, a brilliantly twisted 78-minute prog-pop masterpiece, an action-powered primetime TV throwback, and a modern psych-rock classic performed entirely in Swedish. What's more: It only seems to be getting better. As albums and tracks become increasingly accessible via MP3, and the web continues to invent more outlets for exposure to the best of them, we may all have to resign ourselves to the distinct possibility of there being more great music than time to take it all in.

50: Xiu Xiu Fabulous Muscles [5RC]

With Fabulous Muscles, Xiu Xiu frontman Jamie Stewart made no attempt to resolve the apparent incongruities between his experimental leanings and his talent for concise pop hooks. Rather, he finally gave this tension the necessary room to blossom. Xiu Xiu's trademark mish-mash of gamelan clangs, overdriven drum machine beats, and new wave guitars was employed much more economically on Fabulous Muscles, affording the album a structural distinctness lost on previous efforts. But it was Stewart's voice that truly rose to the occasion, taking on traces of Morrissey's rich and astute self-awareness, and pushing it to an almost unbearable level of intensity. There will always be those who accuse Xiu Xiu of cheap theatrics and over-the-top catharsis, but Fabulous Muscles succeeds as both the band's most aggressive and its most accessible album to date, proving that sometimes you have to reach pretty far up your ass to find your heart strings. --Matt LeMay

49: Max Richter The Blue Notebooks [Fat Cat]

My local library has a copy of The Blue Notebooks filed under "classical," which I guess makes about as much sense as any other tag they could have given it. Regardless of what you choose to call it, this is intensely powerful stuff, like raw emotion spilled out of fingertips onto the fingerboards of violins, the buttons and knobs of sequencers, and the keys of a grand piano. It's even a sort of concept album, the voice of a woman narrating as she hammers out a manuscript on a manual typewriter during the quiet interludes. Richter's expansive textures and sinewy string scores have a filmic quality that modern ears can't help imputing to them: "On the Nature of Daylight" plays while the hero walks through marble halls of learning as his best friend commits suicide across campus, and "Shadow Journal" is his late-night discovery of the perfect theorem. The Blue Notebooks sounds best when the sun is shining in other longitudes, when it can help beat back the dark of the night. --Joe Tangari

48: Loretta Lynn Van Lear Rose [Interscope]

As potent a record as any of Rubin and Cash's work together, Van Lear Rose introduced a new generation to feisty Butcher Hollow native Loretta Lynn and added "producer" to Jack White's c.v. As Lynn updates her tales of divorcees, one-night stands, cheatin' men, and family bonds, White wrangles a posse of Detroit and Cincinnati musicians to put epic twang in the May-December hook-up single "Portland, Oregon", White Stripes ruckus in "Have Mercy", and barnstorming boogie in "Mrs. Leroy Brown". But Lynn sounds best-- vulnerable, heartbroken, steely, strong-willed-- on quieter numbers like "Trouble on the Line", the spoken "Little Red Shoes", and "Miss Being Mrs." Generous and good-hearted, closely observed but casual, they're less songs than late-in-life ruminations, coming from somewhere beyond the stage, the studio, or the record label. --Stephen M. Deusner

47: Comets on Fire Blue Cathedral [Sub Pop]

Comets on Fire reinstated their scorched brain policy in 2004, tearing open pleasure centers with a stir of echoplex, pure volume...and gentleness? Yes. Blue Cathedral is the best representation of what began over two previous albums-- it aligns screaming, moustache sweat guitar riffs, and unintelligible vocal splatter with shimmering stretches of organ, tinkling pianos, and mood-drenched percussive splashes. It's heavy, as the absolutely maniacal break about 1:30 into opener "The Bee and the Cracking Egg" will prove. But on Cathedral the quintet-- as officially joined by Six Organs of Admittance raga interpreter Ben Chasny-- is equally committed to crafting meandering layers and trances. This singeing of their thoughtful passages with frontal lobe reverb flamethrowers like "The Antlers of the Midnight Sun" is where Comets of Fire get their true power. It's the dynamic that makes Blue Cathedral at once one of the year's heaviest and most artful releases. --Johnny Loftus

46: Iron & Wine Our Endless Numbered Days [Sub Pop]

Shake off your kudzu-confessional fantasies. Anyone first hearing former film-school prof Sam Beam's lo-fi 2002 debut could be forgiven for thinking they'd stumbled upon a reel of autochthonous, pre-Alan Lomax field recordings. The Creek Drank the Cradle panned across soft-focus Southern gothic scenes like a Civil War-era Zapruder tape, and Beam had the Robert E. Lee beard to match. But Brian Deck's limpid production on this year's follow-up Our Endless Numbered Days confirms old man Beamer is a living, breathing denizen of the aught-four. His songs about the Southland, let's-grow-old-together love and glowering Old Testament deities are as haunting as ever, but now they're sharper and more self-aware. The ostensibly autobiographical intimacy of songs like "Birds Stealing Bread" has scattered like a smoke ring into such Faulknerian parables as "Sodom, South Georgia" or "Cinder and Smoke". But you can still rock your firstborn to sleep with the delicate, melodic "Each Coming Night" and the transcendent back-porch philosophizing of "Passing Afternoon". The disc's freshly polished sound is a reminder that Beam, unlike the antebellum ghosts he evokes, can keep giving us new cinematic visions of the old South. This one's enough to cherish for now. --Marc Hogan

45: The Concretes The Concretes [Astralwerks]

This Swedish collective's previous release-- 2000's EP compilation Boy You Better Run Now-- is passable indie pop; no doubt a decent seller at Parasol or Darla but unlikely to even have made appearance on Sinister tape trees. Which makes this self-titled follow-up one of the year's more pleasant surprises. With its humid, hazy textures and woozy almost drunken arrangements, it's an indie pop album for the late-night taxi ride home rather than the pre-party cocktails. Sure, the record has a few handclaps and couple of Motown homages but they're weighed down by spoonfuls of Velvets-y lethargy and glassy-eyed consolation. Hmm, heartbreak, melancholia, and clinging to fleeting hopes-- perhaps this isn't so different from most indie pop after all. --Scott Plagenhoef

44: Camera Obscura Underachievers Please Try Harder [Merge]

I discovered 2004's most sublime, immediate pleasure by happy accident: Assuming Underachievers Please Try Harder was a new record by the other Camera Obscura, the noise rock ensemble (who knew there were two?), I was initially puzzled, and subsequently swooned, by this charming, urbane confection of Glaswegian indie-pop. It's lovelorn music that avoids the jagged peaks of teen angst and the well-worn grooves of adult heartbreak. Instead, it zeroes in on the young-adult nether realm between them, with canny specificity and a nuanced outlook that's bolstered by the balanced perspective of a male and female lyrical presence. And those melodies! Camera Obscura wears its influences so well you don't mind that one track sounds almost identical to Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne", and the whole thing smacks of Glasgow's other twee-pop darlings. Dear Catastrophe Whostress? As far as I'm concerned, this is the latest Belle and Sebastian record. --Brian Howe

43: Scissor Sisters Scissor Sisters [Polydor]

The Scissor Sisters' first single-- a discofied remake of Pink Floyd's lumbering "Comfortably Numb"-- was a neat trick, but it could have cast them as Right Said Fred for the double-aughts. Instead, the Sisters lived down their novel image with their self-titled debut, a dozen tracks straddling everything from 70s disco and glam-rock to 90s house. They touted their pansexuality while squatting in Elton John's honky chateau, and behind the voguing were intelligent, inventive, and forthrightly emotional songs like "Laura" and "Take Your Mama", and "Mary". The album ends with the one-two punch of "It Can't Come Quickly Enough" and "Return to Oz"-- the former an ode to dreaming on the subway; the latter an epic evoking the New York club scene ravaged by drugs. Certainly, stronger stuff than your average pop album. --Stephen M. Deusner

42: DJ /rupture Special Gunpowder [Tigerbeat6]

Jace Clayton's debut album declares revolt, struts through avenues strewn with police records, sees indifferent ghosts of enemies in tenement windows, and then stares at its bloodied hands with nostalgia. As DJ /Rupture, he previously took Timbaland's polyrhythmatics to its pan-ethnic logic on his baffling DJ mixes, Gold Teeth Thief and Minesweeper Suite, where Borbetomagus' skree-jazz found good company with Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly". For Special, he eschewed turntables and told a fable about Babylon's fall and the delirium that followed with live sung and performed raggacore, spoken-word, hip-hop, noisecore and Appalachian-folk instrumentation. The entire record is a stylistic mess and veers into so many dazed tangents about the chaos that Clayton leaves us with an exhausted Sindhu Zagoren lamenting over a banjo, "I wish I were a mole in the ground." The blood still cannot be washed and the ears still ring. --Cameron Macdonald

41: Les Savy Fav Inches [Frenchkiss]

It should be surprising to find a singles compilation on a year-end list, but for Les Savy Fav's legion of wild-eyed adherents, this is a no-brainer. Inches is the culmination of a seven-year project that collects both sides of nine 7'' singles onto one career-spanning disc. Les Savy Fav's consistently electrifying live performances indulge in a sort of beautiful atrophy, where Tim Harrington begins in poised malevolence, then sheds layers of clothing and self-esteem until his de-evolution to an engine of debased humanity is complete. Following suit, Inches is arrayed in reverse chronological order, beginning with the streamlined, dancey post-punk of Les Savy Fav's latest efforts, then steadily regressing to the rawboned chainsaw rock of their earliest. A yawn yawn yawn is just a hair away from a scream scream scream, and it's this tension between cosmopolitan cynicism and raging sincerity on which Inches holds its spin. --Brian Howe